The story of Elrood

ARRR WOOF WOOF ARRRRR

Hark!  Hark ye wee beasties and gather ’round, for it is time now for me to tell you the story of Elrood!  This is a man who has lead our tribe into glory, armed with naught but a sharpened stick and a PS3 controller.  He is a legend among his kind, which is impressive saying as how he is the sole remaining member of a cabal of ancient yet honorable nerd ninjas who have transcended the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises to actually become their own bands.

Sploding in 30 Seconds: XBLA Goodness

Microsoft’s summer of arcade is here!  Two of the games are out and….what’s that?  Oh, the two games I’m reviewing are NOT summer of arcade?  They’re older?  Are you questioning Faceplant’s sense of timeliness?  Well ok yeah, Enosh did just review a British crime film from 2009 but I don’t think that’s fair.  Haha that is so true voice nobody but me can hear, Enosh DOES suck.  Anyway, two games!  Granted, they may not be part of the official “Summer of Arcade” that Microsoft does, but it’s always nice to get some high quality XBLA games.  One is a sequel to a previous summer of arcade gem, and the other is a port of a PSP game.  Both remind me of old school gaming experiences, though in completely different genres.  Maybe I’ll get to Bastion or From Dust, but for now, let’s do some sploding or play an entire epic RPG quest in 30 seconds.

MORTAL KOMBAT!!!!!!

I used to *LOVE* Mortal Kombat back in the day.  I remember once being in a bar with my cousins while my father and uncle were deep in very adult like conversation.  I was probably about 10, so screw CONVERSING, there was an original Mortal Kombat arcade cabinet!  I was terrible at the game, but luckily my cousins were no better.  The key to this whole endeavor was that somehow my cousins and I knew the inputs for one of Scorpions fatalities.  Hold block, press down twice and Scorpion would rip off his mask and then SET A DUDE ON FIRE.  In the current MK game I’m about to talk about this would be very pedestrian.  At the time though, this blew my fragile young mind in how awesome it was.  Many of my Dad’s dollars that night went into the MK machine.  The latest version of Mortal Kombat, aptly titled “Mortal Kombat”, feels familiar enough to remind me of those days while packing enough new content, awesome visuals, and totally over the top brutality to make it well worth a play through.

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, A Proper Review

Authors Note:  While this is a review of Cataclysm, I’m writing it from the perspective of somebody who has a pretty good idea of how WoW works already.  What I’m trying to say is that this isn’t the most MMO or WoW noob friendly review.  Actually what I’m REALLY trying to say is:  Sorry Zenestex.

So readers of Faceplant, some of you probably remember back when World of Warcraft: Cataclysm came out I posted an impressions article.  Well actually, who am I kidding, most of you probably don’t.  (That article is here!)  I wrote that to give an impression while it was all still fresh, but I never considered it to be a true review.  MMO’s are that breed of game that are insanely difficult to review.  Experiencing all the content is almost impossible.  Patches come in all the time, adding new stuff, making some things better, totally breaking others, a review is only a snapshot in time of an MMO.  However, as the first major patch of the post Cata WoW approaches (patch 4.1, for the record) I want to give Cataclysm an actual review.  As somebody who has played the game since back in the vanilla WoW days it’s somewhat amazing to see where the game is now compared to where it was.  So let’s nerd out hardcore and see what the results were of Deathwing obliterating a good chunk of Azeroth.

The Social Network

How does one define success?  Is it an external influence, be it acceptance from peers, money, or power?  Or is it more of an internal state that requires a strong sense of self-awareness and satisfaction with one’s current station?  That question is the heart of The Social Network, the “Facebook movie” as it has unsatisfactorily been called.  Mark Zuckerberg, the real life creator of Facebook, is here represented in movie form by Jesse Eisenberg, and his success (or is it?) plays out on-screen.  To be honest, I don’t know how true to real events the film is.  After seeing the film twice though, I’ve come to realize; it doesn’t matter.  Director David Fincher (who has some other films you may have heard of, such as Zodiac, Se7en, and a little thing called Fight Club) didn’t set out to tell the true story of the founding of what is now one of the biggest companies in the world.  What he set out to do, and has amazing success at, is capture a moment in time when the rules changed.  The internet is responsible for a zillion things, but none more important than as a platform for social interaction.  How truthful the movie is in the details doesn’t matter because the larger picture is all that is needed;  Mark Zuckerberg became the youngest billionaire ever by bringing all the social aspects of the web to the mainstream.  That’s enough of a backdrop for a quality film.  In the hands of a director like Fincher however, a quality film elevates itself to the best movie of the year.

The Dilemma

This movie should have worked.  I’m not saying The Dilemma should have won Oscars.  There was no expectation of an absurdly high meta critic score or massive box office success.  This would be no huge monkey maker for the studio.  All that being said, going in, it had some things working for it.  Vince Vaughn plays that guy Vince Vaughn plays very well, and the trailers quite clearly show he’s basically playing himself.  Kevin James is a good if not great comedic actor.  Jennifer Connelly and Winona Ryder have proven themselves to be immensely talented actresses, and here they were playing the significant others of our movies leading men.  Oh, and somebody named RON HOWARD was directing.  He did a few little movies like Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, The Da Vinci Code, and Frost/Nixon.  So while I wasn’t expecting a ground breaking movie experience I was expecting one thing.  I expected that a comedy with this much talent would make me laugh.  Sadly, that was not the case.  I know in every movie review I put up here I always say “the less you know about the plot the better”, but forget that this time.  I’m going to spoiler the hell out of this movie, because it doesn’t matter.  So if, for some reason, you want to avoid spoilers, stop reading now.  Keep reading, and wonder with me why what should have been a decent comedy became an unfunny almost drama with characters who don’t even come close to acting like normal people would in their given situation.

The Kids Are All Right

I feel like I’ve been going down a dark road lately here at ye olde Faceplant.  Dead Space 2 and Black Swan are not the lightest entertainment propositions one can have.  So before I become like the monkey at the beginning of 28 Days Later, let’s lighten it up a bit.  I vowed to myself this year to see more Oscar nominees.  I’ve seen five!  Two years ago I would have taken in all the possibilities, but of course now the academy saw fit to expand the best picture category to ten films.  TEN.  Too many, damn it.  Anywho, all this led me to watch the Kids are All Right, which is nominated for Best Picture and has Annette Benning nominated for Best Actress (sorry Annette, that race is over, please refer to “Swan, Black”).  It has strong performances from all the principal actors involved and is probably most aptly described as a film about a family trying to keep their shit together in some trying circumstances.  (But not REALLY trying circumstances, like necromorphs, or turning into water fowl.  Happy thoughts today people!)  I feel like the best picture nomination might be a byproduct of the aforementioned expansion to ten (TEN!) but this is a film worth watching.

Black Swan

Darren Aronofsky is one weird dude.  I saw his first film, Pi, and at about the time where the human brain was just lying around on the floor, the weird idea germinated in my head.  Requiem for a Dream followed suit, although it at least had the “excuse” that all the wacked out stuff you were seeing was a result of drug use and not just insanity for insanity’s sake.  My point in this very brief film history is that Aronofsky is not one to direct happy-go-lucky family films.  Ironically, the only movie of his I have not seen is The Wrestler, which is the biggest critical and commercial success he ever had…until Black Swan.  Black Swan definitely falls into the weird category.  It’s dark, oppressive, and utterly captivating.  Aronofsky deserves some of the credit, but the real star and the main reason to see the film is Natalie Portman.  I know, here I am, another dude on the internet saying “OMG NATALIE PORTMAN IN BLACK SWAN, OSCAR LOCK!”.  I’m quite aware it’s not an original position.  But really, I challenge anyone to see the film and not walk away feeling the same.

Dead Space 2: I am still scared

I was a huge fan of the original Dead Space.  Visceral Games put together a true survival horror game instead of the action style games with creepy looking enemies that seemed to call themselves survival horror in this generation.  It was moody, brooding, and most importantly, had a great atmosphere.  So Dead Space 2 has pretty big shoes to fill.  Luckily for us, it absolutely keeps the high standard set by the first game.  There is no reinvention of the core gameplay, but a couple of shifts in philosophy and small refinements make Dead Space 2 not QUITE as scary as the first, but it’s also prettier, has better controls, and a more compelling story.  And trust me, when I say not QUITE as scary, I don’t mean its become Hello Kitty island adventure.  The scares are still delightfully disturbing.

Rock Band 3 and Music Games: More Expensive Than Harmonix

Raise your hand if a room in your house contains a plastic instrument.  My hand is up.  And since I can’t tell if anybody reading this is raising their hand or not, I’m just going to assume a bunch of you are because it helps my point.  It’s the internet, this is considered research.  So this article started in my head as a review of Rock Band 3, which it still sort of is.  The more I thought about it though the more I realized that one basically has to take music games as a whole, at least Guitar Hero and Rock Band anyway.  Why were they so popular?  Why are sales numbers dwindling now?  How the hell did Harmonix, the main force behind creating the genre via Guitar Hero, get sold for FIFTY DOLLARS?  That is less than I paid for Rock Band 3!